Tag Archives: solidarity

So I haven’t written in like a month. It’;s been pretty busy, but yeah. So anyways next week I’m going to a Black Solidarity Conference. I’m both looking forward to it and not. I think I’m going to find it slightly annoying to rub elbows with the Talented Tenth. I’m going to find it so annoying. As a horizontalist/lib-socialist I’m going to find their politics incredibly annoying most likely. All of Friday is dedicated to election talk… dullsville. So I’ve realized that I don’t rub elbows much with Black students from schools other than mine. But judging that aBlack Solidarity Conference is sponseredby Abercrombie & Fitch and Morgan Stanley I’m not missing much.

Speaking of Black Solidarity– everyone should check out We Who Are Dark, its an interesting treatise on Black solidarity.

After reading this post on reappropriate, about how Latino and Black issues come to the forefront, leaving behind other people of color (in this post specifically Asian American). And though I care very little for what happens in the elections (after all very little of it will make me happy), I find the idea of Oppression Olympics interesting both within and outside the context of this election year.

The Oppression Olympics that are going on now, and have been for awhile, has split everyone into teams. There are the white patriarchs crying reverse discrimination and blaming a multicultural society for the fact that a white man might not still be able to be president, and according to what I’ve gathered from mainstream media it looks like the entire democratic race is dependent on white women, black men, and Latino voters, all of whom have to fight for who is more oppressed to have their voices heard. And that is the problem in the case of elections– everyone has to compete to get there candidate elected. There is never any cooperation. And on the level of government this fails all but the “majority.”

I’m more interested in how Oppression Olympic games play out on a personal level. I’ve had people try and pull me into these games (usually young, white women though I’ve been engaged by all). I’ve often had people tell me that insert group has had it the worse. White feminists have to call me out on my male privilege, and I have to call them out on their white privilege, and depending on how mature everyone is being, we will fall into Oppression Olympics to determine who is silencing who. The same games get played when stereotypes of the Model Minority get played. Or I’ve been guilty in the past of playing the Oppression Olympics in my mind when it came to upper class students of color from the Global South at universities (does their class privilege in the South make them better or worse off than my national privilege makes me?). These games do nothing but divide, and are the multicultural equivalent of the racism that was fostered between oppressed ethnic groups for each other. We have to get past these games, and stop competing.